razib | June 16, 2007The debate below about circumcision has gotten fast and furious. I stand in the untenable position of neither believing that circumcision should be promoted by the authorities as a "health" precaution in the modern world, but also not considering it an abomination in the eyes of the Lord. That being said, one thing that should be value neutral are statistics. Here is a description of the regions of the world where circumcision is and isn't routine. In short, it is a common practice in most of Africa, with the exception of the southern portion of the continent. It is normative amongst…
razib | June 15, 2007So like many people I am nearly fed up with Firefox. I really don't have that many plugins, but the freezes and crashes are just too frequent. For the next week I'll be trying out Safari. Anyone have experiences to relate? (on Windows)
razib | June 15, 2007As you might guess, my site is one of the sources of content. If you're reading this post at New York Articles rather than at my actual site, you are partaking of a suboptimal experience.
I'm not going to give you the URL for the lesser, because there is no value-added to speak of, unless you count the pennies that come in to the leech that grabs the RSS and sells the Google Ads.
Does such a site do anything to improve an already crowded blogosphere? Does anyone treat a sloppy feed aggregating site of this sort as a regular destination (or really, as anything but an accidental destination)?…
razib | June 15, 2007James Hrynyshyn has a post up about circumcision and its relevance to cutting the risk of HIV infection & loss of pleasure. There are a priori reasons to believe that circumcision could reduce the risk of catching diseases through intercourse & that pleasure might be curtailed, ceteris paribus of course in both cases.1 Assuming a straightforward acceptance of the likelihood of the possibility of both which factor should be taken into consideration when making a decision regarding male circumcision? That decision must be, I believe, conditioned upon the prior facts in a particular…
razib | June 15, 2007Tyler Cowen has a nice review in Slate (actually, a slice & summation) of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's most recent book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Taleb's discursive and meandering narrative delves mostly into the domains of economics, statistics and psychology, so Cowen is in a good place to tackle his argument. Myself, I was intrigued by the jeremiad against the Gaussian and Poisson distributions. Like Michael Stastny I think Taleb goes a bit too far. Nevertheless, I have to wonder about the fact that though we model characteristics like IQ as a bell curved…
razib | June 14, 2007Ruchira Paul sent me an email asking me to clarify this exposition of how gene selectionism can explain 50:50 sex ratios. First, I would like to second the author of the original post's injunction to read Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, it is a masterpiece of scientific exposition. For many people an encounter with the The Selfish Gene is a K-T scale event, the world is changed after the encounter. That being said, it surely isn't the last word. A friend of mine mentioned how she noted that Dawkins heaps scorn on Amotz Zahavi's Handicap Principle, but a generation later this model has…
razib | June 13, 2007Waitress is a sleepy little comedy which serves as an enjoyable way to pass an afternoon. The film stars the ethereal Keri Russell as the centerpiece of a drama set in a sleepy little town left unspecified, though the mention of Biloxi suggests the Deep South. With that in mind Andy Griffith's starring role is apropos, because just like The Andy Griffith Show this film attempts to communicate southern charm & authenticity sans black folk (I do recall one or two at a bus stop). This sort of surreality pervades other aspects of the film, Russell's fine and crisp beauty seems more Boston…
razib | June 13, 2007Dan Everett, linguist who was the subject of a profile in The New Yorker a month ago, gave a talk to Edge, and the transcript is online (the video is still in progress from what I can see). There is a lot of detail there, and most of it is pretty unbelievable to me. I've commented in the past on their supposed immunity to religion. Everett says some more:
I sat with a Pirahã once and he said, what does your god do? What does he do? And I said, well, he made the stars, and he made the Earth. And I asked, what do you say? He said, well, you know, nobody made these things, they just…
razib | June 13, 2007New Scientist has a short story synthesizing all the accumulating data that Neandertals weren't that primitive, and that the inflection point of cultural creativity 40-50 K BP was the culmination of a gradual process.
razib | June 13, 2007There's a new paper in Nature (OPEN ACCESS), Identification and analysis of functional elements in 1% of the human genome by the ENCODE pilot project:
...First, our studies provide convincing evidence that the genome is pervasively transcribed, such that the majority of its bases can be found in primary transcripts, including non-protein-coding transcripts, and those that extensively overlap one another. Second, systematic examination of transcriptional regulation has yielded new understanding about transcription start sites, including their relationship to specific regulatory sequences and…
razib | June 12, 2007A few days ago I posted on "Islamic finance," which to non-Muslim eyes looks an awful lot like an intellectually dishonest "work around." This sort of thing is not limited to Muslims, at one point the Catholic Church took the ban upon usury seriously, opening up a niche for Jews as moneylenders. But what about financial transactions amongst the Jews themselves? The reality is that Orthodox Judaism is not nearly as friendly toward exploitative financial transactions between Jews, in a manner not dissimilar to Islam, and so naturally "work arounds" emerged which followed the letter of the…
razib | June 11, 2007A few weeks ago I posted on a bizarre fatwa having to do with adult breast feeding. At the time it was kind of a joke, and I wasn't totally sure that it was even a real story (though I did check for multiple sources). Well, today The New York Times has this up: Egypt's Muslims Seek Fatwas on a Variety of Issues:
First came the breast-feeding fatwa. It declared that the Islamic restriction on unmarried men and women being together could be lifted at work if the woman breast-fed her male colleagues five times, to establish family ties. Then came the urine fatwa. It said that drinking the urine…
razib | June 11, 2007There is a somewhat confused piece in The New York Times about eugenics for dogs today. I say confused because the article offers various cautions, but connecting the dots from the facts littered throughout suggest easily why the cautions aren't warranted. One of the big issues lurking throughout the article is that of pleiotropy and correlated response, pretty important factors in directional evolution.
The logic is simple, if a gene, A, has a quantitative impact on traits 1-100, selecting that gene specifically in the context of trait 23 will have unforeseen consequences for the 99 other…
razib | June 8, 2007First, check out this quick primer on genetic association studies. With that, Combined Genome Scans for Body Stature in 6,602 European Twins: Evidence for Common Caucasian Loci @ PLOS. You need such huge sample sizes to pick up the relatively weak singals from numerous quantitative trait loci. The study reiterates the finding that height is about 80% heritable, that is, 4/5ths of the population wide variation is due to genetic variation. At least amongst whites in the modern world (where nutritional deficit is minimized). That being said, though plenty of potentialities lurk beneath the…
razib | June 7, 2007The LA Daily News is doing a lush series on porn. They're flash files, so be aware of that, though nothing I saw was not work safe. The ubiquity of porn chronicled in that series in America today is worth keeping in mind when we simultaneously have a teacher convicted of a felony because she inadvertently exposed some of her students to porn pop-ups (spyware which another teacher mistakenly installed).
razib | June 7, 2007I am a proponent of nominalism when it comes to religion. Or, to put it another way, instead of a religion being a Platonic category with precise and specific boundaries, I think a more accurate model is a distribution of ideas and sentiments in the minds of human beings which is always in flux. The many layers of cognitive operation, from reflective verbal commitment and elaboration, all the way down to reflexive and automatic conceptualization below the conscious surface, means that the shape of distribution the itself may change as a function of the level at which one is examining the…